Tag: Podcast

Last week I posted a podcast in which I interviewed Mrs. Claudia Mornhinweg, a Stillwater piano teacher. Claudia was an excellent guest speaker and I hope people enjoyed the podcast. However, with this post I want to describe the production of the podcast.

For the podcast I rented an audio recorder and microphone from the Media Department of OSU. When I first started the interview, I did not realize that I would need to wear headphones to hear the recording and spent several minutes recording “Hello? Testing.” Fortunately, Claudia was patient and once we started the interview, there were no issues with her voice being too soft or unclear.

On the other hand, my voice was inadequate, as I was unclear and could barely be heard. When I asked Claudia questions after some of the stories she shared with us, I was laughing, so what I said would have been hard to understand. I ended up re-recording most of my lines with Audacity later, splicing them in, and raising the volume so I could be heard.

Of course, raising the volume caused background noise, so I ended up using Audacity to reduce it. Audacity also proved to be useful for cutting out the long pauses that occurred when Claudia and I passed the microphone back and forth, as well as any “uhs.”

My final step with Audacity was to splice in some piano music, and originally, I planned to play “Puff the Magic Dragon” for background music. Unfortunately, when I tried to reduce background noise with Audacity, it erased parts of the song. In the end, I found some piano music online, spliced it in, and, with some relief, uploaded the project to SoundCloud before posting it on my blog for listeners.